"With the impacts of climate accelerating, the world just can't afford to mine and burn more coal or allow unprecedented volumes of water to be extracted from inland rivers and precious water basins," she said in a statement.

Mr Shorten has previously said there is still plenty of scepticism that the controversial project will ever proceed.

Adani, an Indian mining giant, revealed earlier this month it had scaled back its plans for the mine as it tries to stitch up funding for the project.

The original $16.5 billion Carmichael coal mine planned to export 60 million tonnes of thermal coal each year, but capital costs have now been scaled back to less than $2 billion for the first stage.